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Session 3: Children and Monstrosity
Chair: Elizabeth McCarthy

The Webcam as the ‘Evil Eye’ in Child Internet Exploitation
Colette Kavanagh
Pacifica Graduate Institute, Santa Barbara, California, USA

The Evil Eye is one of the world’s most widespread beliefs. It has been documented for over five thousand years, and is so universal that it must be considered one of the oldest mythologies known to humankind: the petrifying effect of its gaze can transform one into a dehumanized object of shame.  
The primary meaning of the Greek word vaskania is “Evil Eye.” It implies “fascination“—mesmerizing with the eyes, like an animal with its prey. It suggests to enchant, to charm, or to entice through seduction, because it is imbued with overtones of sexuality and fecundity.
Belief in the Evil Eye is still alive, and appears in myths and symbols cross culturally. It is often portrayed as the Single Eye—the one that sees only for its own benefit—or the Double Eye, because it hides evil under the mask of friendship.
One of the ways the Evil Eye manifests in modern culture is through the perverse use of the webcam: it offers the ability to see the person one communicates with over the internet, but it is also used to exploit children. In the privacy of their bedrooms, this inexpensive eye-form camera results in thousands of children becoming unknowing participants in the twenty-billion-dollar online pornography industry. The predators are sophisticated in manipulating children into performing in front of the webcam ¾undressing, showering, or masturbating online for the person they believe is a single viewer, or their “special friend.” These performances are then posted on for-pay pornography sites without the knowledge or consent of the minors, or their parents, who are unaware of what is happening beyond the closed bedroom door. Many children are petrified by fear and shame. In other cases, parents themselves are using “the Eye” to exploit their children for financial gain: children are becoming a commodity.

From Victim to Victimizer: Child Abuse and the Perpetuation of Evil
Christina Rawls
Department of Philosophy, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA

The documented statistics report one in every three girls and one in ten boys in the United States are sexually abused during childhood or adolescence, yet most incidents of childhood abuse go unreported. If you apply these facts to your local elementary schools, the realization, for an empathic individual, is that childhood physical and sexual abuse is a taboo topic, a common practice, and a secret epidemic. In the USA, there are many behavioral health organizations where in-home therapists, for example, are not permitted to work with children on issues related to abuse unless they are a licensed social worker employed by a child protective services agency or the reports have already been legally prosecuted. Another difficulty stems from the high rate of reported incidents compared to the low number of social workers investigating each report. Abused and humiliated children without a witness to their pain often go on to become victimizers, where the repetition compulsion of repressed trauma is carried out on others, including entire populations, such as was the result of one abused child named Adolf Hitler.
Child psychologist and philosopher Alice Miller has written extensively for over 40 years on the blinding phenomenon of blaming the child instead of the adult and the “monsters” of our history: for example, Mao and Stalin, who were children of severe physical abuse without an enlightened witness. Even the young Freud reversed his original theory that his female patients were mentally ill due to childhood sexual abuse and replaced it with the idea of blaming the child, with his so-called inborn incestuous fantasies, and protecting the adult. It is more than clear that “monsters” can be created and perpetuated on a mass scale as a direct result of childhood abuse; they will not stop their humiliation, torturing, and attempts at escaping their own victimization by becoming victimizers themselves fighting to regain the power and control robbed of them as children. We will continue to perpetuate evil in our societies if this taboo yet very common practice of childhood physical abuse, and particularly pedophilia, is not brought directly to everyone’s attention. I will attempt to raise awareness into how to combat this international problem through understanding how repressed trauma is repeated if it is not addressed as early as possible with someone a child trusts. Also, I will discuss some of the fatal consequences of society’s general ignorance of this epidemic.
Bio data: I am a mental health therapist and behavioral health case coordinator for Wesley Spectrum Services in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. I am also currently a doctoral student in philosophy at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, with a Bachelor’s degree in psychology and a Master’s degree in philosophy. I have taught college level courses in philosophy and I am currently developing a company- wide training on childhood sexual abuse for Wesley Spectrum Services. My main areas of interest are the works of Benedict Spinoza, Henri Bergson, philosophy of psychology, the benefits of an inter-disciplinary education, and the social consequences of the inability to feel emotions due to repeated trauma.

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The attack of the Zombie Schoolgirls: Stacy (Naoyuki Tomomatsu, Japan: 2001)
Colette Balmain
Department of Arts and Media, Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College, United Kingdom

‘Men, kill your daughters! Be the one to kill your girlfriend!’

In Stacy (Tomomatsu, Japan: 2001), young schoolgirls find themselves transformed into zombies once aged between 15 and 17. These zombie schoolgirls can only be killed by dismemberment (more precisely having their bodies chopped into 165 pieces) by either their fathers or boyfriends. Failing this, the ‘Romero repeat kill squad’ (an offshoot of the military) are called in to exterminate the Stacy. One of the preferred ways of killing them is with the ‘Bruce Campbell Right Hand Version Two Chainsaw’. However despite these obvious intertextual asides to American zombie films, Stacy has little in common with most zombie films and does not generate into a simple parody of the genre, like Shaun of the Dead(Wright, 2004).  Instead I would argue that it utilises the generic conventions of the zombie film in order to critique the fetisization of the schoolgirl in contemporary Japanese society, as epitomised by kawaii (a term used to refer to cute schoolgirls) and Aidoru (young pop idol schoolgirls, who were at the height of their popularity in the 1990s). In the place of these negative patriarchal stereotypes of adolescent femininity, Stacy offers the figure of the kogal, as a feminist alternative to the idealized adolescent femininity that dominates Japanese culture.
In contemporary Japanese culture, images of young girls are caught between the virginal Shôju and the sexually promiscuous Kogal.  Napier argues that the ‘shôju and her alter ego the burikko (the cute girl), is the perfect non-threatening female, the idealized daughter/younger sister whose femininity is essentially sexless’. (Napier, 95). In opposition to this is Kogal which ‘has come to denote, greedy, wilful shoppers.’ (Miller, 2004: 241). In this paper, I explore how the zombie schoolgirls in Tomomatsu’s 2001 low-budget film, Stacy, disrupt Japanese ideas of appropriate femininity as epitomised by the shôju who conforms to the complex systems of obligation that defines both familial and societal relationships in Japan. I contend that the process of zombification through which these young schoolgirls ‘become’ Stacies, charts an Oedipal trajectory from shôju to kogal and thereby from repression to liberation. Against critics of the film who view the figure of the zombie schoolgirl as a simple (patriarchal) criticism of the kogal as a vacuous, money driven, prostitute like figure, I apply Laura Miller’s (2004: pp. 225 – 247) definition of the kogal as a feminist sub-cultural formation in contemporary Japanese society, to explore how the zombie schoolgirls in Stacy, as kogals, ‘challenge dominant models of gendered language and behaviour though linguistic and cultural innovation’ (Miller, 2004: 225).

Loving the Alien: A Moral Re-Evaluation of Paedophiles
David White
Department of Philosophy, University of Calgary, Canada

Paedophiles are widely regarded as the most morally repugnant people. But on a close examination of what basis in general we can use to determine that a person's character is morally objectionable, it appears that there is reason to question this popular assessment. This paper begins by looking at what recent scholarship tells us about the effects on children of sexual activity with adults. It then goes on to discuss some of the recent controversy in the psychological community about whether or not the sexual attraction to children should be regarded as a mental disorder. It continues with an examination of what moral philosophers have to say in general constitutes having an evil character and then goes on to show how such criteria are not met by most people who are sexually attracted to children. Then it is argued that there is in fact reason to think that in most cases those who are attracted to children are more deserving of moral praise than blame. The popular view of paedophiles, however, forces most people who have such attractions never to share voluntarily that fact about themselves with others. In the final part of the paper an argument is given for why the general population has a moral obligation to make it safe for paedophiles to be open about their sexual attractions without fear of a hostile reaction.

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